Tagged 'Web Analytics'

Google recently switched to secure search for all users. This means the search terms (keywords) people searched for will be blocked from web analytics software, including the most popular - Google Analytics. Many people are alarmed at this, concerned it will render keyword-level analysis of website activity impossible.
They're over-reacting.
It's not that bad.
BACKGROUND:
Keyword analysis of website traffic is essential for many reasons. It's the only way you can know what people were looking for when they came to your site. This is essential in order to understand sales performance, marketing performance, what people want from your site, how to improve your site, and almost every other legitimate purpose you can think of. Secondly, there's no harm in it. The data is not personally identifiable, except by Google, and going secure doesn't protect people from Google.
DEALING WITH IT
Google introduced secure search for users who were signed into a Google service some time ago. In the sites I analyze, that took out about 25% of the data. That didn't bother me because there was enough left over to provide reliable data regarding user intent. Not much has changed. Google aren't the only search... Read more

It’s the beginning of the month and it is again time to report to your clients or your boss on the SEO progress made last month. It is time to justify your SEO strategy, your efforts and yourself. Sound familiar?
With the challenging landscape of SEO comes the challenging landscape of SEO reporting, and I’m not just talking about merging SEO data sources into one excel file and adding a logo to try to make it look professional, presentable and understandable. I’m talking about how to make all the data points and metrics indicate real progress, and more importantly meet your clients’ or boss’ expectations.
Since the way we do SEO has changed, the way we report on it must change too. Effectively setting up the reporting metrics to prove progress may make the difference between meeting the clients’ expectations or not.
SEO reporting should answer these questions for your client:

Are our efforts helping us reach our organic search goals?
What SEO tasks were completed last month in relation to our goals?
What impact did these efforts have on the web presence for organic search?
What new opportunities were identified to optimize for organic search?
Are there any new competitive threats?

We’re living in a world where data is everywhere and everything can be measured. Yet the vast amount of data that is available is often too much to consume and sift through to really obtain the relevancy to measure performance. This is why it’s so important to begin with metrics that tie back to business goals and objectives.
Many brands online have a digital presence, but don’t necessarily sell anything online. In fact, the goal of their web presence is really to educate consumers on their product or service by developing meaningful and relevant content. The challenge with measuring the impact of this approach is that we’re not surveying the IQ of website visitors before and after consuming a brand’s digital presence, albeit, not a bad idea.
However, while this can pose as a challenge to measure, with social media highly integrated in everything on the web, it’s much easier to have an indication of whether the target audience is consuming website content and engaging with it. These are not your standard bounce rate and time on page metrics. Unfortunately, the days of relying on those metrics are over. Consumers can now visit a page, get the information they need or were... Read more

The great thing about digital marketing is that you can track and analyze everything, even with a small budget. You can watch your impressions and clicks grow- you can even watch customers navigate your website in real time. However, effective analysis requires you to concentrate on original goals (based on KPIs), without getting distracted by extraneous metrics.

I love data. Lots of data. Mountains of data. The more data, the happier I am as a marketer.
However, I’m sometimes perplexed when marketers use surface level data to try to make strategic marketing decisions. When metrics like Page Views become the centerpiece of a marketing discussion, it’s actually risky trying to identify insights without taking the analysis much, much further.
Page Views, Time-On-Site, Exits and other top-line metrics can be the start of the equation, but they require cross-data analysis to generate meaningful, actionable insights. Without a second or third layer of data, you run the risk of completely misinterpreting a hodgepodge of unsegmented data.
Instead of looking at Page Views, for example, you’ll gain far greater value by analyzing Page Views of new visitors vs. repeat visitors, or of those coming to your website through SEO vs. those through display ads, or of those who converted onsite vs. those who left without converting. It’s possible that your best site visitors are not those that look at the most pages. High Page View counts can sometimes reveal that something’s actually wrong with your site, such as complex navigation that drives extra, needless clicks. There are countless ways that surface level data... Read more